Warburg in Rome (29 page)

“Hi, Sarge,” Warburg said. “Surprised to see you still here.”

Rossini straightened up, grinning. “I spoke to the general. Good news. He said he could pull strings. I can stay with you.”

“You mean General Mates?”

“Yes. On loan, he said. The jeep, too. I can still be your driver. Not that you need me for translating anymore.”

“I don’t know, Sarge. This is outside General Mates’s chain of command. He doesn’t have the authority to cut your orders. My orders are crystal clear. No U.S. government support. As of yesterday.”

“But Civil Affairs,” the sergeant said, “that’s General Mates, right? You’ll be really civilian now, outside the Army altogether.”

“Which is why he needs you at my side, I guess, eh? More than ever?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, Sarge. We’re friends, so we can level with each other.” Warburg moved to his desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a flask and two shot glasses. He poured a finger of bourbon into each, then picked them up. “Here you go.”

Rossini took the glass uneasily.

Warburg toasted him. “You’ve been great. Thanks.” They clinked and each threw his shot. Then Warburg said, “Now Mates will have to find some other way of keeping track of me.”

“Jeez, Mr. Warburg . . .”

“Don’t worry about it, Sarge. I know you had no choice. And it never hurt us that Mates knew what we were up to. But that’s over.”

“But you’re still at it, right? Your new gig? Still the refugees.”

“And it’s a long way from finished, no matter what Washington says.”

“Where will you go?”

Warburg grinned, pouring two more shots. “Your last tidbit for the general? Tell him how much I appreciated you.” Clink. And they drank. Then Warburg said, “And my new office is at the Villa Arezzo on the Aventine Hill.”

“Rome Red Cross?”

“Right.”

The Aurelian Wall had been constructed with brick-faced cement in the third century. The fortification set a world standard, yet was breached again and again, by sacking Visigoths in the fifth century, Normans in the eleventh, and the berserking forces of the Holy Roman Emperor at the Reformation. Marguerite d’Erasmo wondered if Queen Victoria had been aware of this history when, for her embassy in the Eternal City, she had purchased this palace long nestled against the wall’s stoutest rampart. It would not protect the British, either.

She mounted the grand staircase of the embassy. The British had shuttered the building during the war, but Fascist hooligans had repeatedly broken into the place, doing their ransacking worst. Now its marble floors, its Venetian mirrors, its stucco works, and its frescoed halls had been almost completely restored to a high polish, and Marguerite felt she was being ushered into the private quarters of royalty. But no, she was simply being shown to yet another set of offices where functionaries worked on the problem of refugees.

Her escorts were Sir Noel Charles, the ambassador, and his wife, Lady Charles, who had been abruptly summoned when Sir Noel realized that the Red Cross delegate from Geneva was a woman. Representing the International Committee under the mandate of the 1929 Geneva Convention, Signorina d’Erasmo was there to set up liaison procedures between Geneva and Britain’s recently expanded internment camps on Cyprus, which were being administered from the British office in Rome—here.

Marguerite had sensed the ambassador’s unease at her arrival. His job was to make plain that in all relevant matters—sanitation, nutrition, health, and so on—conditions maintained by Mandate Immigration Services on the balmy Mediterranean island of Cyprus would be humane. There was nothing intimidating in the way Marguerite had presented herself, a harmless woman whose uniform hung inelegantly on her sylph-like frame, who handled her briefcase without panache, and who’d blushed when, on impulse, the ambassador had kissed her hand.

On the way up the grand stairs, addressing herself mostly to the chatterbox Lady Charles, Marguerite asked polite questions about the palazzo. Amid all the home decor trivia that cluttered the replies, she learned that, owing to slovenly Italian building-trade practices and strike-driven interruptions of supply, the renovations had been hopelessly delayed; only these, the public spaces and offices, had been properly restored to this point. The living quarters in the east wing, where the ambassador and his senior staff would take up residence, were not expected to be habitable for some months yet.

The innocuously named Migrant Relocation Office was on the third floor, where the ceilings were lower, the floor tiles less opulent, and the walls decorated with hung artworks instead of murals. There Marguerite was introduced to the four men and two women whose desks and tables were covered with what to her were the familiar odds and ends of refugee accounting: lists of names, documents carrying the distinctive United Nations relief stamp, “safe and well” sheets, commodity aid forms. In clipped English, while the ambassador and his wife stood awkwardly at the office threshold, she asked the staff about record keeping, medical staffing, agricultural markets, child nutrition, and the plight of the aged. Her expertise was on full display. She withdrew from her briefcase several sets of Red Cross forms and officiously explained that weekly census reports and camp condition evaluations would be required to be filed with the Rome Red Cross office for forwarding to Geneva. International Red Cross would be establishing its own on-site station in Cyprus as soon as possible, but in the meantime the Migrant Office here in the embassy would be regarded as the responsible point of contact. Was that clear?

The ambassador was relieved at the woman’s efficiency. She refused Lady Charles’s offer of tea.

In descending the grand staircase, Marguerite was again able to make casual chat with the ambassador’s wife, and she confirmed her impression that, as of now, no one lived in the villa, which was empty at night and only occasionally patrolled by passing policemen. The advantage of a truly great house, Lady Charles pronounced, is that petty pilferers are incapable of imagining it as penetrable. As with the Aurelian Wall, she said, gesturing behind her and ignoring ancient and recent history of sacking, the impression of security is the best security.

In short order, the English aristocrats, ignoring the butler, had shown the Geneva official out of the embassy, and closed the door behind her with just enough alacrity to suggest relief. Within moments of that, Marguerite had accomplished her rendezvous with Jocko Lionni.

David Warburg looked up from his desk, his eyes snagged by a form passing on the other side of the frosted glass of his office door. He put his pen down, snuffed his cigarette, checked himself momentarily, then pushed the swivel chair back on its wheels. Again he told himself to stop. He was all at once at the mercy of an impulse he had not felt in many months, a visceral intuition tied to the barest of glimpses.

How many times had he retraced his steps in a narrow street, returned to a corner, crossed a restaurant dining room, dashed along the Tiber embankment, haunted the small piazzas of Trastevere? But none of that since winter. He had, meanwhile, at intervals of months, lain in the arms of three—no, four—women, none of them repeated. In their eyes he had seen only hers.

What a fool it had all made him. He was in no hurry to return to that untethered state of mind—to feel, again, like such a sap. So for the longest minute he just sat there looking up at the angled ceiling. The marmoreal plaster was sagging as if about to collapse—a doom that had no doubt threatened here for centuries.

His office was in the eaves of the ancient building, with slanted low ceilings and narrow windows that overlooked the masts of cypress trees. The dozen or so WRB workers whom Warburg had brought with him to the JDC were scattered elsewhere in the building. They were Italians for whom loss of status as employees of the American liberators was a jolt, and he regretted that their offices were even more ad hoc than his.

Dozens of silhouettes regularly passed his door-panel window, characters in a shadow parade to which, normally, he was indifferent. But this time—something. What? The feminine form, exceptionally tall; the neck of an Egyptian princess; the posture of one carrying a tray of crystal; a stride of pure purposefulness. When, the year before, she had disappeared after Fossoli, Warburg had come here to the Red Cross offices more than once. The report of those who knew her was that she had abruptly resigned and departed Rome, which had left her colleagues mystified. Their puzzlement was later redoubled when they learned from
Il Tempo
that Andrea Doria Pamphili, the Allied-appointed mayor, had included her family villa on the list of Fascist requisitions to be reversed. This meant the release to her, as the daughter and only heir of Angelo d’Erasmo, not only of the walled Parioli mansion in which she’d spent her childhood, but of the Bank of Rome’s d’Erasmo accounts that had been impounded on Mussolini’s personal order. Warburg had subsequently learned that, at the turn of the year, a priest had claimed the property in her name, but Marguerite herself had never reappeared.

He got up, crossed to the door, opened it. Again he hesitated. But what the hell. He went into the corridor, which, as usual, was bustling. Displaced persons were only one emergency among many here. Staff and volunteers, organized by
corpo
and
comitato
, addressed problems of water purity, blood supply, rodent removal, prosthetics, nurses’ training, hospital equipment, mobile clinics, POW packages, missing person searches—on and on, the detritus of war.

At the end of the corridor, Warburg entered the canteen, an open garret space that had wall racks suggesting ancient storage uses. Now the staff refreshment room was all card tables and folding chairs. At either end of a long counter stood, sentry-like, an oscillating floor fan that drew summer air in through the open windows. A dozen people stood or sat in clusters of two or three. On the far side of the room, at a table holding a large coffee percolator, she stood with her back to him, stirring milk and sugar into a cup.

“
Buongiorno, Signorina
,” he said as he drew up behind her, ready to have the woman show herself to be someone else. But no. When she turned, the first thing that struck him was how unblemished her face was. He put his hand out. “
Sono David Warburg
.”

“I remember,” she said in English. She seemed entirely unsurprised. She took his hand, the briefest of shakes. She was wearing a dark blue four-pocket tunic and matching skirt. A white patch with the red Geneva cross marked her left shoulder. The silver buttons of her tunic also bore the cross. Her black hair was knotted into a bun on the back of her head, exposing her Nefertiti neck. Inside the open collar of her tunic, a notch emphasized the hollow at the base of her throat, an allurement he’d not seen before because, a year ago, she’d never been without that red kerchief. She wore no makeup. A thin line of perspiration rode her upper lip. And, yes, her eyes were dark green.

The buzz of talk in the room gave their encounter a kind of insulation, as if they were alone. They stood in silence for a moment, but the gaze of neither fell. Finally he gestured toward a pair of chairs on opposite sides of an adjacent card table. “
Ci sediamo?
”

She smiled. “You have Italian now.”

“I’m a slow learner, but I’ve had time,” Warburg said. “It’s been a year. More than a year.”

“Has it?” Seated now, she sipped her coffee, then gestured toward it. “This is very bad.”

Warburg held out his pack of cigarettes. She declined. He took one and lit it. Waving out the match, he startled himself by asking, point-blank, “What are you doing here, if I may inquire?”

She shrugged. “What do you mean? This is my place. I should ask you.” She crossed her legs. The sheen of silk. And, he noted, her legs were cleanly shaven.

He pretended to study the tip of his cigarette. “DPs still. I’ve moved over here to coordinate my work with the Society. I am still organizing relief, refugees, searches, repatriation, transit, all of it. Although not for my government.”

“Who then?”

“American Jewish organizations. A joint committee.”

“The Joint Distribution Committee. Of course, I know of it. There is an office in Geneva.”

“You went to Switzerland?”

“Yes.” She looked away.

Warburg said, “But I was told you had left the Red Cross. No one here knew anything about you.”

Still not meeting his eyes, she said, “In Geneva they needed someone with languages.”

“Giacomo Lionni also disappeared. I know the Roman Jewish community well by now, and Lionni, too, has been gone all this time. One might have thought you’d both been killed at Fossoli, but you were seen in Rome a day or two later. I spoke with the
portiere
at your building in Trastevere. You returned there and collected your things. Lionni, too, was seen. Then disappeared.”

Marguerite was watching the cloud swirl in her coffee. “I heard from Signora Paoli, later, that you had been asking. You returned many times, she said.”

“I thought you might have gone to Geneva. I made inquiries there as well. You were not at Red Cross headquarters. Not as of September. Nor January, when I checked again.”

She shrugged. “Nevertheless, I am there now. I am coordinating among national societies. I make supervising visits to camps, transit points, and offices. Seven countries. One of them Italy, which is why I am here. Updating card index systems. The record keeping is falling far behind. To save the people, we must save the records. Many, many more people keep arriving from the East.”

“Fleeing the Reds.”

“Yes.” After a pointed silence, she added, “And fleeing from Catholics.”

“So you are speaking of Jews.”

“There is much to flee, even now,” she said. “Even without the war. In France, half a million dwellings are reduced to rubble. In Greece, a thousand villages and towns simply disappeared. In Holland this past winter, many thousands of elderly froze to death. In Germany, what they call ‘Russian babies’ are being born. We conclude that between seventy and a hundred thousand German women are pregnant from rape. In Berlin, women tell each other that when the water gush comes from between their legs, they should get on the tram, because the seats are clean and the ticket taker will help. Naturally, he does not help. Here in Italy, too, where it seemed less like rape, perhaps—a plague of pregnancy. War babies everywhere. And where is the milk for these infants? Clean water? The death rate for babies under the age of one year—across Europe!—is nearing half. The Dark Ages have returned.”